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New Mode of Production, Same Contradictions?: The Transformation of Digital Capitalism and the Specter of ‘Technofeudalism’ Lee, Seung Cheol This paper examines the ‘technofeudalism’ thesis proposed by Yanis Varoufakis and Cédric Durand, clarifying its significance and limitations. Varoufakis and Durand argue that capitalism has transitioned into a new mode of production called ‘technofeudalism’ due to the growing prominence of rent extraction, monopolization, and predatory accumulation by big tech platform companies. This paper points out that such a diagnosis relies on an abstract and narrow conceptualization of capitalism that treats profit and rent, exploitation and expropriation as mutually opposing categories. Instead, this article proposes reinterpreting technofeudal tendencies as renewed processes of primitive accumulation in the digital realm and as a general intensification of expropriative dynamics within capitalism’s historical development, which has long operated as an exploitation–expropriation nexus. Furthermore, the paper discusses how these tendencies both deepen the de-linking of capitalism and democracy and intensify imperial competition over global rent extraction, while simultaneously opening up possibilities for the reconstruction of the commons and new forms of economic planning. Through these analyses, this study argues that the technofeudalism thesis functions less as a concept for a new mode of production than as a heuristic metaphor that renders visible key transformations in contemporary digital capitalism. technofeudalism, platform, digital capitalism, rent, primitive accumulation, expropriation, Varoufakis, Durand
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